Manticore Reborn

by Peter J Evans

  "It's doing more than that." Lydexia opened her surgical kit and began laying out the bright, steel devices within. "I'll tell you all about it as soon as I get the chance."

  "I look forward to it. So, doctor-captain, what can I do for you?"

  "Just a small thing. How would you like to watch me cut up a mutant spy?"

  There was a slight pause. Then: "Is it dead?"

  "Regrettably."

  "A pity. But I'd be happy to anyway. It's been a long watch, and I could do with a good laugh."

  "There," Lydexia said later, pointing out a series of small grafts nestling at the base of the mutant's skull. "Biomorphic implants."

  "That's how they were able to get through our entry scans." Hirundo sucked in a breath through his teeth, a long hiss of disgust. "The filthy scum must have secreted themselves among that last influx of helot workers. And what happened to the ones they replaced can only be surmised."

  "I think I can guess." Lydexia stepped back from the table and turned to check on the tissue series. As she had expected, the samples she had taken from the corpse showed the effects of a massive overdose of chronoplasts. Not all of the man's organs had suffered the same exposure, though. Cutting the power to the time engine early had resulted in an unstable burst.

  Parts of the mutant lying on the table had aged a hundred years in those few nightmarish seconds, others only fifty. If the time acceleration hadn't killed him, Lydexia had no doubt that the shock of the imbalance would have.

  "So," Hirundo said, folding his arms. "I hear you're off to Ascension."

  "I am no such thing." Lydexia gave him a look, feeling the slight start that she always did when seeing his face. She was far more used to seeing him carapaced in Custodes armour, everything below his eyes covered by his breathe-mask. "Gemello said that Ascension had expressed an interest, that's all."

  "Still, it would be a big step."

  "It would." Lydexia stopped where she was and took a deep breath. "It frightens me, though, I don't mind saying. I mean, Ascension is the holy grail of anyone engaged in temporal research, and God knows there are few enough of us, but it could be too far, too fast."

  The Custodes smiled grimly. "The idea of being on the edge of the Manticore Gulf holds no terror for you?"

  At the sound of those words, Lydexia's heart bounced, a mixture of fear and need. The laboratory station lay at the boundary of an area of space so dangerous that an entire battle fleet was on permanent station to surround it. At its heart lay something of devastating power, a nightmare from the past that had laid waste to worlds.

  Ascension was there for a purpose, and that purpose was pure research. If Lydexia ever set foot there, it would be because she was acknowledged as a prime in her field.

  "It holds terror," she breathed. "Yes, but if I was asked, I'd go today."

  "Then let's hope Admiral Caliban knows a prime when he sees one." Hirundo nudged the corpse. "Shall we continue gutting this creature, or have you done with him?"

  Lydexia reached over to the table and lifted a powered bone saw. "A few more cuts, I think. If Gemello smiles on me I might get to do this to our frozen Blasphemy, and I'd like to hone my technique."

  She was partway through slicing away the top of the mutant's skull when Hirundo's linker went off. He stepped away to answer it, as he always did, speaking quickly and precisely into the machine without ever once raising his voice loud enough for her to hear.

  When he put the linker away, he was frowning. "I have to go."

  "What's wrong?"

  "Long range sense-engines have picked up a series of hard returns at the edge of the system. Not many, but it looks like they're closing in. I have to ready the Custodes just in case."

  "I understand."

  He nodded at the eviscerated mutant. "Keep going with this. No security issues now; just take it apart and find out how it works." With that he turned away, heading for the stairs.

  "Thy will be done," she called out, and watched until he was gone from sight.

  The Ochaos system wasn't large. Ships detected at the edge of it could be at Chorazin within an hour or so, even without making any superlight jumps.

  Lydexia continued working on the mutant for a while, reporting everything she found, until the carcass was nothing more than an empty shell. Then she activated the stasis cover again and sat down at her workstation. Even though the gross anatomy was done with, she still had hundreds of samples to test.

  As the brain series began to run, Lydexia brought up a supplementary holo and set it to the temple-station's general alert channel. She would occasionally do this to warn her of events or meetings that she needed to attend, and leave the channel running while she worked. That way, no matter how engrossed she became, there was a chance that she would see the alert in time.

  Tonight, though, the channel had more to tell her than when her next chapter meeting was due.

  The killship Lamarion had been scrambled from its position in Chorazin's shadow and was heading out to engage the incoming vessels. The other two Custodes dreadnoughts, Gatianus and Ugento, were closer, as they had been patrolling Chorazin's orbit. They had been able to slingshot around Ochaos, giving themselves a boost in speed before changing vector to meet the intruders. Ugento had already released its daggership shoals.

  The Chorazin temple-lab was on level three alert. Non-Custodes personnel were being advised to stay in their quarters or places of research, and some system lockdowns had taken place in vulnerable areas. Nothing, Lydexia told herself, to worry about unduly.

  The intruder ships might be lost, or a surprise inspection force from High Command imminent. Even if they were hostile, there were three fully-armed killships between them and Chorazin.

  Even so, Lydexia got up from the workstation, crossed the chamber to the small weapons locker and took a plasma derringer from the rack inside. She pushed the gun into her robes before going back to the test series.

  Minutes passed, flowing seamlessly together as Lydexia lost herself in the data. The mutant's brain had been altered by the chronoplast overload, but to form a complete picture of what the alterations had been she had to first discover which abnormalities were the result of the time engine, and which were natural to the man's corrupted physiology. The massive haemorrhages he had suffered made the tests even more fraught. Lydexia found herself having to repeat each series, blind testing herself, running gene reversions and mutation simulations in order to lay down a baseline.

  She was close, with a few more series, when the alert status went up to level two.

  Lydexia looked up as she heard the warning chimes, then quickly scanned the holo. Daggerships from Ugento had engaged the enemy, and antimat fire was being reported from the intruders. Lamarion had increased velocity, hoping to assist the other killships. The intruder fleet had started to disperse.

  As Lydexia read this, her comm-linker chirruped. She flipped it on. "Speak."

  "Doctor-captain, it's Commander Hirundo. Where are you?"

  "Where you left me. Why?"

  "Stay there, and seal the lab. Do you have a weapon?"

  Lydexia felt herself go cold. "Yes, yes I have. Hirundo, what's going on?"

  "I'm not sure yet." The Custodes sounded grim. "It may be nothing, but be careful."

  The linker went dead.

  She stared at it for several seconds, then stood up. The results of the tests she had done were still in the workstation holos, so she saved them to data-crystal before shutting the machine down. Then she drew the pistol and padded across the lab towards the door.

  As she neared it there was a noise from outside. Something like a heavy, metallic impact, although it was hard to tell through the closed door. It made Lydexia start, though, as she did when the noise came again.

  She froze, listening hard, but there were no further noises. After half a minute she stepped back and locked the door with her crypt disc. It wouldn't stop a determined attacker - the hatch was made from little more than plate steel
and locked with a simple magnetic catch - but it made her feel slightly better.

  She moved back to the workstation, then to the mutant corpse beneath its rapidly cooling stasis shell.

  There was another sound, louder this time. Moments later alarm chimes began clamouring in the observation chamber. Somebody had opened the door to the lightning vault.

  Lydexia bolted to the ladder and scuttled up, drawing her derringer as she reached the top. As soon as she did so she looked through the transpex windows and saw figures below her, moving across the floor of the vault.

  She dropped to the floor and flipped her linker on. "Hirundo," she hissed.

  "Doctor-captain?"

  "Hirundo, there's someone in the lightning vault. I can see them through the transpex."

  She heard him draw in his breath. "For God's sake, Lydexia, stay out of sight. I'm on my way."

  The linker fell silent. Lydexia kept hold of it, the derringer held tight in her other hand, and began crawling on her hands and knees towards the windows. There was a row of secondary workstations there, used mainly for running observational tests while the vault was in use, and she crouched behind the nearest.

  The intruders were nearing the tower.

  They were moving quite slowly, looking around them, readying weapons. Going with stealth, not speed. Lydexia saw one of them point up at the time engine.

  For a moment she felt herself relaxing. These were not intruders, but some of her own people. The man who had pointed was an Iconoclast shocktrooper, unmistakeable in uniform trousers and battle harness.

  Then Lydexia saw the woman standing behind him, and her heart misfired in her chest.

  She was quite tall, slender, dressed head to foot in a figure hugging costume of matte black leather. Her hair was long, crimson streaked with black, and she carried a pistol in either hand. Lydexia realised, with the part of her mind that wasn't shrinking back in terror, that whatever lay frozen down in the Custodes stasis facility was most definitely not Durham Red.

  The Blasphemy was alive, and she was here.

  8. ONE FROM THE VAULT

  Red should have known that her luck had to run out sometime.

  Things had gone badly from the start. One of Sibbecai's ships, the frigate Needlefang, had begun to suffer damper failure partway through the superlight jump to Chorazin. Without functioning dampers, the ship would have been prey to every physical force from the stresses of vector change to the impacts of weapons fire. A starship engaged in battle might routinely make manoeuvre burns of a hundred gs or more. If Needlefang tried that with the dampers down, it would fly apart only seconds after its crew had been reduced to pulp.

  There was no way to repair the frigate in superlight, and even returning to realspace partway through the journey would delay the operation by days. Reluctantly, Sibbecai had ordered Needlefang's captain to alter course and head back to Haggai, then execute a very gentle deceleration from superlight when she got there. With luck, the stricken ship would be able to get back into the cavern without breaking up or killing its crew in the process.

  It was a bad omen, and everyone knew it. Durham Red, quite rightly, considered that she had enough to worry about just keeping her side of the plan together. She had reached the stage of refusing to let herself even think about what she had to do, because to consider it in any detail would be to realise just how many things could go wrong. There were parts of the operation that she hadn't even discussed with her companions. If she had, they would have mutinied there and then.

  The fleet decelerated to realspace at the edge of the Ochaos system. As soon as the fires of jumpspace faded away, Red had Godolkin pilot Omega Fury out of Persephone's landing bay, engaging the shadow web as he did so. That was when things almost fell apart for a second time: two killships from the Archaeotech protection fleet were patrolling between Chorazin and the deceleration point. Red's plan to fire up the main drives and let Fury build up some speed had to be thrown away immediately. The killships would have spotted her drive flare in moments if she'd tried it.

  Fury had left Sibbecai's flagship with Cormoran and his strike team already aboard. The four mutants had been on the lower deck, strapped into crash seats in the staging chamber, but Red had practically forgotten about them as she watched the killships closing in. An Iconoclast dreadnought was heading right towards Fury, their courses so near to intersecting that Red was on the verge of pouring on the power anyway. Better that than collide with the monstrous vessel.

  The range between Fury and the nearest killship was down to less than five hundred kilometres when Cormoran leaned into Red's workstation. "Is there a problem?"

  Red started and yelped in surprise, then turned to glare at him. The man moved like a ghost. "What makes you say that?" she snapped.

  "I thought there should have been a vector burn by now."

  "Change of plan." She nodded towards her forward holo.

  Cormoran followed her gaze and drew in a sharp breath. "Just how magnified is that image?" he whispered.

  "Not much. Range three hundred clicks and closing." On the holo, the killship was a wall of metal, its forward section gaping like a maw. Weapons, some so vast that Fury could have flown right into their barrels, filled her view. "They were half way between us and Chorazin when we came out of superlight, and I can't even warn Sibbecai."

  The dreadnoughts would pick up any communication at this range. Sibbecai might have noticed the lack of a drive flare and worked out Red's dilemma on his own. But with two killships bearing down on him, he might well have had other things to worry about.

  "Blasphemy?" That was Godolkin. "Either authorise me to fire the drives, or prepare for collision."

  "Give me a moment."

  "I don't have one."

  "I said-" She stopped in mid-sentence. Jets of searing flame were erupting from the killship's hull. For a horrible moment Red felt certain Fury was being fired on, but then the dreadnought began to slide across her holo.

  "Course correction," said Cormoran. "Bringing their spinal weapons to bear. They'll release the daggerships soon."

  Red sagged back and let out a relieved sigh. "Thank sneck for that."

  The killship Ugento had a complement of almost two hundred daggership interceptors. All of them fired their main drives as they raced ahead of their mother ship, and Red took that opportunity to get Fury back on course. One drive flare wouldn't be noticed among all those others, even if it was heading the wrong way.

  For the next hour, all she could do was wait. Behind her, the dreadnoughts engaged Sibbecai's battlegroup, which immediately began to split up and take evasive action. Their task wasn't to defeat the Iconoclast ships - it was unlikely they could have done so anyway - but to keep the killships away from Chorazin while Omega Fury neared the temple-lab.

  Fury, however, was late. The mutant ships were already in full retreat before Red reached orbit.

  As the ship entered Chorazin's orbit, the hull temperature was already beginning to rise. Red could only keep her fingers crossed as the gauges began to climb. She had hoped to come in at night, when there was less chance of the shadow web being cooked clean off the hull. Another part of the plan gone wrong.

  Her holoscreen were stuttering, the view they showed brightening, then darkening, and growing bright again as the pickups strove to compensate. Ochaos was already blindingly close.

  Fury dipped lower, racing over the glowing surface of Chorazin. Red saw a point of light appear on the horizon, growing into a hazy line and brightening until it became a thread of pure white brilliance lancing upwards into the airless sky.

  "Blasphemy, the cooling laser is ahead."

  "I see it," she replied. "Godolkin, drop your speed. They won't have any visual pickups at the entrance, they'd never last. Let's not give them anything else to key on, okay?"

  The Iconoclast grimaced. "The longer we stay under this inferno, the more chance of losing the web altogether."

  "Yeah, and if we go in hypersonic the
y'll pick us up on Doppler and frag us before we even land, so put the bloody brakes on."

  Godolkin did as he was ordered, dropping the ship even lower as he fired Fury's manoeuvring thrusters. Thankfully, that was one emission that the Archaeotechs wouldn't be able to detect. The heat from the thrusters was nothing compared to the temperature of Chorazin's surface.

  The holo had stopped dimming and was simply getting more and more uncomfortable to look at. Just when Red thought it couldn't get any brighter, the cooling laser's beam reached vertical, and a star appeared at its base. A second later, Red was looking at a blank screen - the sense pickup had been burned out, fused by the reflection from the heat shield's mirrored neutronium surface.

  She saw nothing more until the ship flew in under the lip of the shield, its final thruster bursts masked entirely by the searing heat outside, and then settled into the most remote docking cocoon in the spaceport.

  The docking cocoons were heat shielded and linked directly to the cooling laser. As long as the spaceport staff didn't check their records too closely, Fury would be safe there, hidden until the strike team needed to leave. When that time came they would all be relying on Judas Harrow - much to his disgust, Red had ordered him to stay on board. She would have been more than happy to have him along, mostly as a welcome contrast to Godolkin's malevolent sarcasm, and the murderous intensity of Cormoran's strike team, but she needed someone to stay with the ship and keep the drives warm. If things went badly wrong, and there was every chance they still might, the young mutant might be their only ticket to freedom.

  Once inside the temple-lab, things started to go well once more. Red's passage through the facility was less eventful than she had anticipated, thanks to the running battle taking place at the edge of the system: the appearance of Sibbecai's ships had triggered an alert, and most of the Archaeotechs had voluntarily confined themselves to quarters. Those they did see were quite easily avoided - hooded men and women who walked with their shaven heads down, their gaze turned inward.